Thank heavens for our leaders

They’re so much more perceptive than the rest of us. I was enthusing about this only the other day to a visiting friend.

He might see Salisbury as just an ordinary provincial town, I told him, but our modest little Market Place had memorably been described by a senior official as ‘the most important medieval open space in Europe’.

He was visibly impressed. “So what are they going to do here?” he asked as we strolled through the market.

“Dig it up and re-surface the whole lot in Chinese marble,” I replied. “It should be finished in about six months’ time.”

“So this’ll be a building-site for Easter and the whole of the summer - won’t that be pretty disastrous for the market stallholders and all these restaurants?”

“Maybe, but evidently the planners think it’s worth the sacrifice. You know what they say: no pain, no gain.”

We walked past Sainsbury’s into the central car park.

“Hey, this is a great site!” he exclaimed. “Know what I’d do here? I’d build a big three-storey hotel and international conference centre with covered car-parking underneath. You’d have tourists and conferences flocking in. They’d be just a few minutes’ walk from everywhere: the theatre, the cathedral, the shops, everything. So that’s what they’re doing, right?”

“Wrong,” I answered. “Brighter people than you and me have studied this very carefully and they’ve agreed that what we need here is less car parking, more housing and more shops.”

“More shops? But I’ve counted at least 30 empty premises in the centre and that’s not counting charity outlets or vacant offices. Why build more?”

“I’ve told you,” I said wearily, “These are really, really clever people who’ve looked at our problems. They’re insistent that the answer to having too many empty shops is to build more shops. The answer to a shortage of parking spaces is to cut parking spaces. The time to dig up the market square is when business is at its peak. You and I may not be able to understand their thought process but hey, we’re not the ones with the vision.”

“By the way,” I added. “Did I tell you there’s going to be an election in May?”

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